Rebirth: Starting from Lighting Up the Tech Tree

Chapter 206 Consciousness Upload

The interstellar neural laboratory is located two floors below ground level.

This floor has no windows, is constantly heated and humid, and requires iris recognition to enter and exit. Shen Yiming calls this place the "Deep Space Zone," and only he, Zuo Cheng, Tang Ning, and two core engineers have access. From the outside, it looks like an ordinary corridor, but pushing open the fire door reveals a 400-square-meter laboratory.

Only a few people know what Shen Yiming has been doing here over the past six months.

It all started with a simple idea. If brain-computer interfaces can accurately read neural signals from the motor cortex and translate them into control commands, could the same technology go a step further, not just reading signals from individual movements, but reading complete brain activity, and not just translating them into mechanical commands, but replicating them into a digital entity?

Zuo Cheng said, "You want to do consciousness uploading."

Shen Yiming said, "It's not about uploading. It's about digitizing neural activity and then reconstructing it in a digital environment. Whether it can be called consciousness depends on the behavior after the reconstruction."

Zuo Cheng asked, "How difficult is it?"

Shen Yiming said, "A mouse has one-thousandth the number of neurons in its brain compared to the human brain, but that's still 80 million neurons, each with an average of thousands of synaptic connections. To fully capture its neural activity, hundreds of thousands of points need to be sampled simultaneously. Currently, the NX-40 only has 2048 channels, which is at least two orders of magnitude less."

Zuo Cheng said, "Then what should we do?"

Shen Yiming said, "We don't sample the entire brain. We only need to sample key pathways in key brain regions, and then use the model to fill in the missing parts. It's like reconstructing a complete piece of music from hundreds of sampling points; you know music theory, so you can fill in the middle notes."

Zuo Cheng thought for a moment and said, "Let's try."

The first step was to select the experimental subject. An eight-month-old male SD rat, in good health, was chosen. Shen Yiming named it "Alpha." The surgery was performed under strict anesthesia, implanting a specially designed high-density electrode array with 4,096 sampling points in the main motor cortex and hippocampus. This array was a special version of the NX-40 chip, specifically designed for animal experiments.

Two weeks after the surgery, Alpha was in a completely normal condition, eating, drinking, and exploring just like before the surgery.

The real experiment began in the third week.

Shen Yiming's team built a digital virtual environment—a simple square space containing food, water, and obstacles—that perfectly mirrored the structure of a real-world experimental chamber. They then allowed Alpha to freely explore the real-world chamber for seven days, simultaneously collecting its neural activity data around the clock.

Seven days, 168 hours, a time sequence of tens of thousands of neural activities.

Tang Ning was responsible for feeding this data into a deep neural network model, with the goal of teaching the model to deduce Alpha's behavioral intentions from neural signals. After two weeks of training, the model began to gradually learn Alpha's neural language. Looking to the left, several groups of neurons would fire simultaneously. Approaching food, the activity frequency of another group of neurons would increase. Encountering an unfamiliar object, a completely different set of activity patterns would emerge.

By the end of the fourth week, Shen Yiming felt the time was right.

He said, "We put the model into a virtual environment."

The moment the virtual Alpha was placed into the digital experimental chamber, the entire laboratory fell silent. The digital mouse on the screen stood still for two seconds, then began to move. Instead of following a fixed path, it first explored the walls of the virtual space, behaving like a real mouse touching them with its whiskers. Then it circled the walls, stopping at the eastern corner, where the food bowl was located in the real experimental chamber.

Shen Yiming said, "It's looking for food."

Digital Alpha lingered in one corner for a few seconds, then moved to another corner, the location of the water source. It tried to touch the ground with its virtual nose. Although there was no tactile feedback in the virtual environment, its neural activity patterns matched the real Alpha's patterns when exploring the water source with over 82% accuracy.

Zuo Cheng asked, "Is this a copy or is it itself?"

Shen Yiming said, "I can't answer that question. What I can say is that the behavior exhibited by Digital Alpha exceeds the range we can predict from the training data. It's making choices, not replaying events."

He said, "The consistency rate between the original and digital versions is about 91% when performing routine actions and 85% when performing selective exploratory actions. It hasn't dropped below 80% at its lowest point."

Zuo Cheng looked at the two Alphas on the screen: one sleeping peacefully in the real world, breathing steadily, and the other continuing to explore in the virtual world. There was no data connection between them; all the behaviors of the digital version came from previously collected and modeled data.

But it is acting on its own.

Zuo Cheng said, "This isn't copying, it's migration. You've transferred a living process to another medium."

Shen Yiming remained silent.

After a long silence, Tang Ning said, "If this logic holds true, then can consciousness also be transferred in this way?"

Zuo Cheng said, "Theoretically, it's possible. It just means the number of neurons in the brain would increase by several orders of magnitude, leading to a greater computational load and increased model complexity, but the logic remains the same. What you've achieved on mice today, you can one day replicate on humans."

He spoke calmly, but no one in the lab responded. Everyone was processing the weight of his words.

That night, Zuo Cheng sat alone in his office for a long time.

He opened the system panel; the accumulation rate of the eighth branch had exceeded seventy percent. The seventh leaf was taking shape, its form different from all the previous leaves; it wasn't a single color, but rather it was faintly glowing.

Below this line of text, the system added a new line of information that had never been marked before: This technology direction touches on a core node of the technology tree and cannot be accelerated using points at this time.

Zuo Cheng stared at the words, a thought flashing through his mind. This system didn't appear randomly; every direction, every node it provided, pointed to something specific. Communication, aerospace, AI, brain-computer interfaces, and then consciousness uploading. Each time, it was exactly what he needed, and the system would point to that.

Perhaps it wasn't just a coincidence.

He turned off the panel, picked up his phone, and sent Yu Ying a message: Are you asleep?

Yu Ying said, "We're still reviewing the report. There's a problem with the data from the second phase of the space photovoltaic project; the degradation curve is a little faster than expected."

Zuo Cheng said, "Don't stay up too late, I'll help you watch it tomorrow."

Yu Ying said, "Okay."

Putting down his phone, Zuo Cheng walked to the window. The lights in the deep space zone were still on; Shen Yiming was probably still down there. Alpha's data was still being collected; Digital Alpha was still walking its own path in virtual space.

One rat, four thousand sampling points, a digital world.

The door was already ajar. He didn't fully know what lay behind it. But Shen Yiming had proven today that the door could be pushed open.

How far they can push depends on whether they dare to go any further.